How Staged Is Breaking Amish? Who Left Years Ago? Are Their “Families” Really Actors?
September 24, 2012 by Hollywoodite
Breaking Amish is a TLC reality show that purports to document four members of the Amish community and one Mennonite girl leaving for “the first time” to travel to New York City for relatively arbitrary reasons including personal freedom, freedom of expression, and pursuing modelling, for which they’ll apparently be shunned by their whole town and their respective religions.
The Breaking Amish synopsis on the website of its production company, Hot Snakes Media, says: “It’s a six episode, 60-minute unscripted series following the lives of outrageous young Amish men and women as they experience life, for the first time, outside of the Amish.” Their claim: the show is real, not contrived, not staged, not scripted. According to the people who made it.
However, the show is only on its second episode and there’s already mounting anecdotal evidence that it’s a complete fraud. It’s illustrative of one’s experiences were one to leave those communities. It’s basically scripted drama, not a reality show.
Specifically, there are marriage and divorce records, old social media profiles and modelling profiles, and more to demonstrate that the cast’s bios are inauthentic.
Of the cast members claiming to leave for the “first time,” Jeremiah Raber reportedly left 14-years-ago. Sabrina, 25, got married in 2009 (here’s her marriage license), she had already left the community (there are photos circa 2012 in non-Mennonite clothes), and she hadn’t been a practicing Mennonite in years. Another two cast members, Abe Schmucker and Rebecca, are pretending to court each other for the first time when they already have a baby together (they’re in a photo circa 2011 wearing non-Amish clothes). And when viewers became suspicious, some of the cast’s social profiles and photos were deleted. For example, Kate Stoltzfus had an online modelling profile from 2010 that has since been deleted but not from Google Cache. And Raber’s deleted-but-cached MySpace page shows him in non-Amish clothes in photos dated from 2007 to 2010.
In more alleged fakery, the people portraying the apostates’ families may not even be related to them. According to the “BreakingAmishTheExpose” Facebook page (via “BreakingAmishTheTruth” Facebook page): David White, who knows Rebecca’s grandfather for over 5 years, says “I can state for certain that the person shown on Breaking Amish, walking away from her wasn’t her grandfather, and he isn’t the kind of person they portrayed him to be.”
A commenter in the same Facebook thread explains why Breaking Amish is using actors or non-relatives to play loved ones, cast members play strangers when they have a baby together, and third-party homes and property are being used to stage the show: “Grandpa is a good friend and a good man, who did not want to be part of this. According to the show, Rebecca and Abe ‘know’ each other from church (they have a child). According to the show, Rebecca’s grandpa told her to get out and she said they wanted nothing to do with her. (Confirmed he was in NY). The house where she was lighting the gas lights and showing everyone where ‘their’ phone shed was belonged to another Amish family who have moved away (rented? borrowed? I dont know). And there is more.”
In short, Cinema Blend puts it well: “I don’t think there is a viewer of reality television out there who doesn’t realize that there’s a certain amount of staging and of course spinning of the stars’ lives that goes on in any show. This one however, seems to make the entire premise of the show a lie, a premise that has brought in about 3 million viewers to TLC for the first two episodes. How real should reality TV be? As the lines continue to blur, we might have to just get rid of that terminology altogether.”
According to BreakingAmishTheTruth, “Amish: A Secret Life” is a more “insightful and respectful documentary” on the same topic.